Shadow of the Axe (The Queen's Intelligencer Book 1)

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘And as soon as you feel you can trust me with such messages.’ Which will probably be never, added Poley mentally. Though Sir Francis might be a different matter…

  ‘Indeed.’ The tone of the word was a dismissal. The pallid face turned away. Sir Anthony was clearly exhausted. The breath seemed to rumble like a thunderstorm in that blanket-buried chest.

  Poley rose a little unsteadily and crossed towards the door which he had left slightly ajar on entering to save his shoulders the painful work of raising his hands to the latch. He turned. ‘But in fairness, Sir Antony, in the mean-time, you must consider me armless.’

  There was a moment of silence as he stepped out and then as he walked down the corridor away from the sick room, he heard a sound he had never heard before. Sir Anthony Bacon was laughing. It was a small step along a long road that might lead to Sir Anthony’s trust, thought Poley. A trifling step – but a beginning.

  He had gone perhaps half a dozen paces when he bumped into Lawson, Sir Anthony’s personal servant, companion in that position to Jacques Petit. Lawson had been sent on ahead to prepare the sickroom and was clearly shaken that a near-fatal accident had occurred while he was away from Sir Anthony’s side. ‘You have not tired him?’ he asked with a worried frown.

  ‘I amused him, as you can hear.’ But even as Poley said this, the laughter turned into a hacking cough.

  Sir Anthony’s servant nodded grimly. ‘I will go to him,’ he said. ‘Dr Wendy will be attending him soon as well, with potions to aid his rest.’ He took a deep breath which seemed to shake a little. ‘And I thank you for preserving him, Master Poley. That I was absent at his moment of need… You may call upon me at any time…’ There was no doubting the man’s shock and sincerity. Poley bowed and they parted.

  Poley found the household at Twickenham fascinating to observe as the condition of his shoulders slowly began to improve under Dr Wendy’s care. Sir Anthony never stirred from his bed except as neatness, cleanliness and bodily functions demanded. But he wrote and received copious letters, keeping a modest secretariat of his own, headed by Petit and Lawson – though it was nothing on the scale of the one Sir Henry Wotton headed for the Earl of Essex. Messengers carrying missives came and went, sometimes packing the sick-room, sometimes leaving it empty of everyone except Sir Anthony and Lawson. And the copious files of his correspondence stretching back, in all probability, over years past.

  *

  No doubt Sir Francis also corresponded but he kept no scribes or archives here. Poley calculated that if he had any number of both, they were probably housed at his lodgings in Gray’s Inn. Whither, amongst countless other places, including the Queen’s private audience chambers, the Queen’s Counsel Extraordinary was in constant motion and attendance. It was Sir Francis, therefore, who brought back an unending stream of gossip, though little that could actually be called ‘news’. He was as careful as might be expected of a leading lawyer, never to overstep legality in what he disclosed. What the Queen told him was discussed under legal privilege, of course, and could never be revealed. And were that not the case, there was still the Tower, housing Dick Topcliffe with his rack and Tom Derrick with his axe, waiting for anyone with loose lips or ill intentions towards the Her Majesty and her realm.

  However, there was a strange air about Twickenham Lodge which exercised Poley’s mind to quite a degree at first. He hardly slept, kept wakeful by pain despite Dr Wendy’s distillations of poppy and willow bark. Nor did Sir Anthony, it transpired. The night was filled with scurrying and whispers. The messengers arrived at all hours, were greeted by Lawson or Petit, passed their messages to them or were escorted into the sick-room to deliver them to Sir Anthony in person. What these messages were, Poley was at pains to discover, but he could never do so – in the beginning at least.

  Slowly at first but increasingly successfully, Poley began to follow these secret comings and goings. He learned the safest places to listen outside Sir Anthony’s chamber, especially as a clement spring approached, opening the grounds to him day and night. Apparently casual strolls between the Lodge and the River and all around the margins of the increasingly unkempt and overgrown gardens, clearly reduced to order for the Queen’s visit and left fallow now, allowed him to discover a convenient hiding place. This was in a bower well-hidden behind a cascade of ancient honeysuckle woven through an ill-tended trellis which did not quite grip the wall. This was hung above the top of a herb-green mount piled against the south-facing brickwork. The entire trellis was pushed further out by a modest buttress outside Sir Anthony’s window. There was a gap behind it just large enough to contain Poley, even when he was wearing a cloak. One that was thick against the cold and damp, and dark to blend in with the shadows.

  Even secreted here, Poley found it frustratingly difficult to overhear anything of critical importance beyond what Sir Francis had already brought home and made common knowledge, not least because the window itself was tightly closed against the last cold draughts of winter. And at least part of the point of Sir Anthony’s correspondence, the long-experienced intelligencer knew, was that the recipient could read and write secret matters without an incriminating syllable ever escaping his lips. Until circumstances altered, and both actions and words began to speak loud.

  As week succeeded week and he found the feeling of being constantly watched beginning to ease, Poley’s less clandestine comings and goings were not without their little nuggets of intelligence. Even at the outset, when the spy felt himself under the closest scrutiny, the doctor often saw both his patients at once to make best use of his time. He would direct his helpers to massage Poley while he treated Sir Anthony under Lawson’s watchful eye and discussed the day’s news; or he might tend Poley himself with herbs and unguents while Lawson or Petit saw to Sir Anthony and chatted as they did so. On such occasions the gossip sailed close to secrecy with increasing regularity as the intelligencer slowly became just another familiar face around the Lodge.

  During the early days, also, he took his meals with Sir Anthony, his companions, the doctor and the doctor’s assistants. Sir Anthony needed feeding by hands much steadier than his own. Poley needed arms capable of moving between trencher and lip in the first place. It was as often as not Lawson’s steady hand that gently fed Sir Anthony while Petit was also almost constantly there. Wine flowed, as did conversation and guards on tongues were lowered with each succeeding glass. Towards, but never quite into, the realm of dangerous revelation.

  And then there was Sir Francis. He exercised Poley’s mind in quite another manner. What was the outcome of those long conversations face to face with the Queen herself? he wondered. Was the younger Bacon brother most assiduously trying to protect Essex’s interests or his own? Was he advising her Majesty to hesitate in the face of the continued negativity in London, where even the walls of the Palace were now being daubed with pro-Essex graffiti. Or was it he who suggested that the Earl’s failures and shortcomings should be paraded in public as soon as this could be done without danger to the invalid’s health? So that the men causing these waves of civil unrest would learn what it was had so offended their righteously outraged Monarch? Master Secretary Cecil wished to be seen to take no part in this – beyond what might be expected of a dutiful subject conscious of his duty to sovereign and state. And yet there seemed little doubt that the Earl’s fortunes continued to wane and someone of enormous power was set on pulling him down in spite of the Queen’s continued vacillation. If not the self-serving Sir Francis then who? And how could Cecil’s secret intelligencer become most fruitfully involved?

  *

  It was, Poley realised, precisely as Sir Anthony had feared from the outset, but short of murder could find no way of controlling now. The armless intelligencer had been flung into the middle of a closed and very secret society like a cat amongst pigeons. A cat constrained by his hurts, but a cat nevertheless; and one that circumstances had made it impossible to eject. Everyone else at the Lodge had worked for the Bacon brothers or
their family for years. They were absolutely trusted. Were, in fact, like the company aboard a well-crewed vessel; each knowing his place and his role, able to rely absolutely on all his companions to do the same. Twickenham Lodge was a kind of sounding-board for what the two brothers knew, suspected, believed or imagined. And, perhaps with the exception of the organisation run first by Sir Francis Walsingham and latterly by Master Secretary Cecil and Walsingham’s nephew Sir Thomas, it was the most efficient intelligence gathering network in the country.

  A network originally designed by Sir Anthony to find facts for the Earl of Essex. A network now, it seemed, becoming dedicated under Sir Francis to finding facts about the Earl of Essex. The historic unity was clearly coming under strain as the new mission pulled elements of the network in opposite directions. Poley’s thoughts and observations kept returning to one question above all. Was the knowledge accrued by the Bacons’ intelligence network designed to help Essex as it had been in the past – or to destroy him as Cecil wished to do in secret and as soon in the future as possible? So whether or not Poley could write was irrelevant. All he had to do was to listen carefully and remember accurately. Everyone in Twickenham Lodge knew that as well as he did.

  Much more deeply and obviously than the case had been at Essex House, Lawson’s attendance on Sir Anthony became almost that of a mother – or a wife. It was clear that they had been in the past – and were in the present as far as Sir Anthony’s frail body allowed – lovers. Poley observed this with no surprise. In the days when he worked for Walsingham’s secret service, he had heard rumours of Sir Anthony’s proclivities and, indeed, the charge of Sodomy in France. He did not judge – and would never dream of condemning such a relationship. Catholic though he had been raised, from which religion he had lapsed, and Protestant as he pretended to be in hopes of a quiet life, despite all the beliefs surrounding him, he was too well aware of his own sins to rush to condemn others.

  For he had himself uncovered the truth of the plot that caused Queen Mary of Scots’ downfall by forging exactly the same relationship with the headstrong young Anthony Babington, who had died calling for his beloved Robert to be treated kindly. Unaware that Poley had been there in the crowd to watch him hung, drawn and quartered. Just as he was at Fotheringay to watch the laughable fiasco of Queen Mary’s beheading. And the earliest methods he had used to worm his way into Babbington’s confidence were almost the same as those he was employing now.

  The first important fact that the legal and political gadfly Sir Francis was able to report was that Essex had been returned to his house with his jailer Sir Richard Barkely ten days after their exit from the place. He also disclosed that Sir Gelly and Lady Frances had been allowed to visit him there. Poley suspected that it was Sir Anthony, however, who was first apart from himself to link this information with the sudden departure of the Earl of Southampton for Ireland at the beginning of the next month – as soon as his passage could be arranged, in fact. Almost as though it dropped from the aether of the sickly spymaster’s lodgings, the suspicion that Southampton was heading west at his friend’s behest to discover whether Mountjoy was still willing to lend Essex the Irish army should circumstances demand it, seemed to appear, ghost-like. And Southampton’s return suggested, again, like the dead king of Denmark in the ancient play of Hamlet, that Essex’s request had been refused. Poley could all too well imagine the desperation that must be mounting not only in the erstwhile occupants of Essex House but in the Earl himself; and any hesitation on Mountjoy’s part would only add to it. Lady Frances reported that he had been well recovered in body when she saw him. Well enough recovered, it was whispered, for him to have lain with her and made her with child again. But, some wondered, was he as well recovered in mind?

  *

  The increasing desperation of the Earl was emphasised within another month when Sir Charles Davers again headed west to see whether the start of the campaigning season in Ireland had done anything to change Mountjoy’s earlier decision. Poley doubted that it had. The gossip from Ireland filtering into the Lodge was that Mountjoy had found a new vocation – he would conquer the island and reduce it to order in the name of his Queen. Thus positioning himself, calculated Poley, as a reliable military leader in the eyes of her successor – whoever that turned out to be. He had neither the troops nor the inclination therefore to indulge Essex and his plots. Especially, thought Poley, as he considered things from Mountjoy’s point of view, that if the Queen was supposed to be the weakling Richard II in popular imagination, the only possible Bolingbroke in a position to succeed her was Essex. All the other contenders were as far removed from battlefield commanders as it was possible to imagine. Even the leading male contender, James VI of Scotland, was noted for his intellect and his hunting of witches rather than for his leadership qualities. So even King James would need a few experienced and successful generals close at hand. Thus it might well suit Mountjoy to support Essex in approaches to the Scottish king as success in that endeavour would obviously serve Mountjoy’s ends as well; but only after he had kept the army tightly under his command and led it to a victory which would enhance his reputation almost beyond measure.

  Amongst the more regular visitors to Sir Anthony’s bedside during these months was Penelope Rich, Essex’s wilful but brilliant younger sister, who was Mountjoy’s mistress and, therefore, no doubt, the courier bringing his personal thoughts and plans directly to the spymaster’s ears as direct access to her brother was impossible for her. Her repeated visits promised to give some strength to Poley’s suspicions about Mountjoy’s true position in the game. Poley would have given much to eavesdrop on their whispered conversations but she was always attended by a group of sharp-eyed retainers from her husband’s household; men who made Gelly Meyrick look like a milksop and, unlike the grudgingly grateful Sir Anthony, would have no compunctions about slitting his throat.

  But the spring and early summer did not pass entirely barren of solid intelligence – though Poley was at first uncertain how to use what he learned. As the Bacon brothers – from opposing points of view perhaps – both became concerned about Essex’s increasing desperation, so Sir Anthony, Lawson and Petit began a new project. At first, Poley was only a witness to their actions – he did not become an auditor until part-way through.

  One night, crouching beneath the trellis, surrounded by the fragrance of honeysuckle and wrapped against unseasonably late April showers in a heavy russet cloak, Poley peered through the tight-closed window into the sick-room. Sir Anthony and his two servants were sorting through the great mounds of paper and parchment which, Poley calculated, represented Sir Anthony’s correspondence over many years. There was no great surprise that they should be reorganising it – it was a considerable body of work in volume as well as in variety. Poley had taken the rare opportunities when he was alone or unobserved in the sick-room to glance through as much of it as chance allowed.

  It had a range of importance – from the philosophical correspondence with Michel de Montaigne, through legal correspondence with the courts of France, medical correspondence with doctors over half of Europe, family correspondence with his sickly mother whose letters in reply were increasingly incoherent, legal and commercial correspondence about the various properties he was being forced to sell as his finances crumbled alongside those of the Earl of Essex. There were probably copies of begging letters which the Queen failed to respond to; Sir Francis was much more successful in that department. And of course there must be – although he had never seen them - the secret and incriminating letters arising from Sir Anthony’s work as Essex’s spymaster. But what surprised Poley, night after night as he watched them working now, was the manner in which Lawson and Petit were sorting so relentlessly through one pile after another. They were glancing at the sheets of paper, then bringing them to Sir Anthony who studied them in more detail, discussed them briefly, then handed them back. A few were then re-filed. But the vast majority of the correspondence was simply thrown into the g
olden throat of the wide-mouthed sickroom fire.

  Was he watching a conscientious record-keeper tidying up his archives, wondered Poley; or a nervous secret agent ridding himself of anything traitorous or treasonous? Motivated, perhaps, by fear that the master for whom he had written most of the burning correspondence was beginning to lose his grip on power as well as on his finances and, conceivably, his mind.

  *

  It was the wind that helped Poley come closer to answering those simple but vital questions. As full summer approached, the breeze swung round so that the weathercocks on the local church steeples all pointed to the South. And it so happened that a steady southerly had the unexpected effect of blowing the smoke back down the chimneys of Twickenham Lodge. Especially the chimney rising from the sick-room. Suddenly the foot or so of smoke that habitually hung as grey as spider-webs beneath the ceiling was joined by choking clouds of back-draught that came billowing unannounced out of the flue. The first time this happened Sir Anthony fell to coughing and choking at once. Lawson came running across the room and opened the window so quickly that he almost caught Poley peering over the sill. But once the window stood wide, it released more than smoke. It released the conversation.

  ‘That’s better,’ wheezed Sir Anthony. ‘At least I can breathe.’

  ‘But you’re not too cold?’ asked Lawson. ‘A chill will do as much damage as…’

  ‘No. This is better. If I feel cold there are more blankets and Jacques can bring the brazier a little closer. Let’s get on.’

  ‘This one, Monseigneur?’ asked Petit.

  ‘Let me see… No it is from Montaigne. Put it with the others to be kept.’

  ‘And this one?’ asked Lawson.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sir Anthony. ‘This one’s from Spain, confirming my suspicions about Cecil.’